RIM Pushes Devices Through Carrier Acceptance – What’s New?

The latest rumor on the net started by the BGR is that RIM is pushing carriers to pass their upcoming devices through carrier acceptance. According to the BGR source RIM is telling carriers that they must approve these devices even though they normally would not pass the carriers Technical Acceptance process. This source says that RIM is telling carriers that the devices must be approved “no matter what – with bugs and problems.”

The irony is that the source then goes on to say how this is exactly how RIM first got the BlackBerry Bold 9000 with OS 5.0 and 3G through technical acceptance. So the question is what exactly is new? RIM has strong armed carriers all the time to get their devices accepted. They practically always offer a last minute update or an update right after launch that addresses many of the bugs. Then carriers proceed to put those updates through carrier acceptance so we can actually get the updates. Shouldn’t we be cheering RIM on?

This is exactly what RIM’s co-CEO’s said on their last earnings call. The thing holding up their devices is this main hurdle of technical acceptance on the radio stack for BlackBerry 7.0 on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors. Once that is approved it will only have to been slightly tweaked for different devices.

The true question users should be asking is why RIM shouldn’t be pushing carriers to approve the devices? Isn’t that exactly what users have been asking for? Don’t get me wrong. Users don’t like buggy devices but as a previous owner of a Rogers BlackBerry Bold 9000 months before it passed AT&T technical acceptance I can easily say the 9000 was worth it. So if RIM has been doing this for years what exactly is the big deal? That they might get away with it? It seems like everybody is complaining about RIM not getting devices out the door and then turning around and not liking how they are working to get them out the door faster…

I am not advocating for buggy new BlackBerrys but it has become pretty common that bugs are a fact of life in a fast moving development process. Why should RIM be different? Just take the Android bug that sent your SMS to the wrong contact… Or the iOS alarm clock bug… Sounds a bit one sided.

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